Competitive Facial Hair: At the biennial World Beard and Moustache Championships in May in Anchorage, Alaska, four local heroes "defeated" the usually dominant German contingent in the 18-category pageant, including overall champ David Traver of Girdwood, Alaska, whose woven chin hair suggests a long potholder. Said Traver, of the Germans, "They were humble, and you have to respect that." One defending champ, Jack Passion of Los Angeles, fell short with his navel-length red hair, despite having authored "The Facial Hair Handbook" after his 2007 victory. Traver acknowledged that no money was at stake (only trophies and "bragging rights"), but added that there are "a lot of ladies" who fawn over men's facial hair. "Seriously, they exist."

-- Men Who Get Around: (1) Thomas Frazier, 42, was jailed in Flint, Mich., in April after his unpaid child-support tab reached $530,000 (14 children with 13 women). He told the judge that he was only trying "to find someone who would love me for me." (2) The total tab of Desmond Hatchell, 29, of Knoxville, Tenn., was not reported at his May court appearance, but the judge questioned him sharply about payments from his minimum-wage job. Hatchell has 21 kids by 11 women, but told WLVT-TV, "I didn't intend to have this many."

-- Bad Sci-Fi Movies Come to Life: (1) A portion of downtown Rotterdam, Netherlands, was blanketed in gluey white "silk" in May, from a six-week-long invasion of caterpillars that strip trees and cover them with gooey larvae. (2) Nicola Bruce and her two toddlers, who live in government-assisted housing in Stoke-on-Trent, England, have awakened nearly every morning for two years to a fresh invasion of about 50 slugs, despite 30 attempts by contractors to find their source (in addition to the remodeling of the kitchen and bath and the bleaching of floors).

-- The head of Florida's Department of Corrections admitted in May that at least 43 children (including a 5-year-old), who observed their parents' prison jobs as part of "Take Your Sons and Daughters to Work Day" in April, were playfully zapped by 50,000-volt stun guns. DOC Secretary Walt McNeil said the demonstrations (in three of the state's 55 prisons) even included one warden's kid, but that only 14 children were individually shot (with the rest part of hand-holding circles feeling a passing current). Twenty-one employees were disciplined.

(1) Two scientists from Britain's University of Oxford, on a three-year study costing the equivalent of nearly $500,000, found that ducks may be even more comfortable standing under a sprinkler than paddling around in a pond. Lead researcher Marian Stamp Dawkins concluded that ducks basically just like water. (2) According to research announced in May by pediatrics professor Jennie Noll of the University of Cincinnati, the more often that teenage girls tart themselves up in online presentations, the greater the sexual interest they provoke.

-- Not What They Were Looking For: (1) Rescuers searching for a missing tourist on China's Taishan Mountain in April failed to find him but inadvertently discovered the corpses of seven other people. (2) Los Angeles Police detectives, frustrated that a 1980s-era South Los Angeles serial rapist-killer is still at large, set out recently to painstakingly trawl for DNA from all unregistered sex offenders who have come through the system since then. They came up with nothing on him, but in late March, they inadvertently matched DNA to a different cold-case serial killer, the "Westside Rapist" from the 1970s and arrested John Floyd Thomas Jr., now 72.

-- Leading Economic Indicators: (1) Bloomberg News reported in April that among the assets for sell-off by Lehman Brothers Holdings (liquidating following its September 2008 collapse) is a "matured commodities contract" for enough uranium cake to make a nuclear bomb. Administrators are awaiting a rebound in its market price. (2) Among the assets for sell-off listed in the May bankruptcy filing of Innovative Spinal Technologies of Mansfield, Mass., were nine human cadavers (eight of which had already been used for research).

-- More Fallout From the Recession: (1) In May, Mitsubishi Motors of New Zealand, to spark sales of its Triton compact pickup trucks as "hardy, versatile units," began offering farmers a companion "hardy, versatile" premium with each truck: a goat. (2) In May, Ichiro Saito, a professor of dentistry at Tsurumi University, publicly warned that as many as 30 million Japanese workers overstressed by the economy are suffering from such severe dry mouth that the country might be experiencing epic halitosis.

When Christina Vanderclip dropped by the house of her former boyfriend, Travis Schneller, in Greeley, Colo., in June, they soon began to argue. According to police, Travis hit her and pulled her hair, then Travis' mother jumped on Christina's back and pulled her hair, then Travis' younger brother Michael and father, Robert, jumped on Christina, too, hitting and choking her. Christina managed to escape, and police, after a 10-hour standoff, entered the home and arrested the entire Schneller family.

(1) Jose Villarreal, charged in Georgetown, Texas, with assaulting his girlfriend, decided to take his chances at trial and rejected the prosecutor's offer of five years in prison. In May, the jury deliberated one minute before finding him guilty, and he got 16 years. (2) Charles Dumas, 37, insisting on his innocence, was convicted of raping a young girl in 1998 and sentenced to 10-years-to-life, but began begging for a DNA test. Finally, earlier this year, prosecutors relented, and a solemn Dumas told a Columbus Dispatch reporter: "This test means my life. It's my last chance to prove to my children that I didn't do this." In May, the results came back: Guilty.

Drivers Who Were Run Over by Their Own Cars: (1) A 21-year-old man in Santa Fe, N.M., inebriated, shifted into reverse, thinking it was "park," and fell out the driver's door (November). (2) A 52-year-old man in Tobyhanna, Pa., ran over himself after falling out of his truck trying to reach the controls of the access fence at his gated community (May). (3) A 56-year-old woman in Santa Monica, Calif., was killed when she left her stalled car in "drive" while she crawled underneath to determine why it wouldn't start. She accidentally triggered the starter with a screwdriver, and the car drove over her (May).

(1) According to a recent report in Britain's Police Review Journal, the government's "Intensive Alternatives to Custody" pilot program has recently assigned young offenders, in lieu of incarceration, to attend skill-building classes in gardening, fishing and learning how to apply for government benefits. (2) The U.S. Department of Justice, with British government cooperation, has been trying for 10 years now to extradite three al-Qaida operatives in British custody to stand trial in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, but Britain's legal system has permitted the suspects to stall with nearly endless bureaucratic tactics. Since the jihadists claim indigent status, all of the challenges are paid for by British taxpayers, with the current tab (according to a May Washington Post report) amounting to the equivalent of nearly $900,000.

On a hot July 2005 day in Stamford, Conn., firefighters not only had to break a car window but overcome the car's owner, who couldn't bear to see her Audi A4 damaged. The 23-month-old son of Susan Guita Silverstein, 42, had been accidentally locked inside, along with the key, for at least 20 minutes on a sweltering, 88-degree day. Silverstein (who was later charged with reckless endangerment) begged firefighters to wait so she could go home and retrieve her spare key, to save her window.

Terrorism Gets Pizzazz: A physical fitness video, purportedly made in April by a U.S.-based al-Qaida operative, gives workout tips to jihadists, urging that they "train as hard as possible" to inflict maximum damage on "the enemies of Allah," according to an ABC News report. Exercises such as crawling long distances on hands and knees are demonstrated by people in flowing robes. The narrator discourages using gyms and fitness centers because of the "un-Islamic" music and "semi-naked" women. And a video released in May, purportedly from al-Qaida in Somalia, features an English-speaking rap singer making a recruitment pitch to U.S. and European youth, including such verses as: "Mortar by mortar / Shell by shell / Only going to stop / When I send them to hell."

-- When a son, angry that his father had ordered him to clean up his room, screamed at Dad and threw a plate of food across the dinner table, Dad called 911. The son is 28-year-old Andrew Mizsak, who lives rent-free with his parents in the Cleveland suburb of Bedford, Ohio, and is a member of the Bedford School Board (and whose mom is a city councilwoman). After police arrived, the habitually untidy son apologized and, according to their report, "was sent to his room to clean it. He was crying uncontrollably." Subsequently, the school board punished Andrew by removing two of his duties.

-- When courts in Nashville, Tenn., get too backed up, a local tradition allows judges to appoint well-known local attorneys to act as "special judges" to help clear dockets. According to a months-long investigation by WTVF-TV, broadcast in April, it appears that at least some of the "special judges" used their power largely to dismiss speeding tickets, including at least one instance of a lawyer's dismissing his own client's ticket. The station found that of almost 1,800 speeding tickets dismissed by courts during the time investigated, 1,300 were by the "special judges."

-- The U.S. Air Force has spent an estimated $25 million training combat pilot Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach but is about to discharge him involuntarily because he is gay. Born of military-officer parents, Fehrenbach has earned 30 awards and decorations, with tours flying F-15Es in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, and was one of the elite fighters called on to patrol the air space over Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001. Also about to be discharged solely for being gay is Army infantry officer Daniel Choi, a West Point graduate and Arabic speaker, who would be (based on a 2005 Government Accounting Office report) at least the 56th gay Arabic linguist to be dismissed from the U.S. military since the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

-- In September 2003, Lisa Strong was hospitalized for a kidney stone, which was not treated properly, and by the time the resultant, massive, life-threatening infections had been dealt with, both her arms and both her legs had been amputated. She filed a lawsuit against the doctors in 2005, but in May 2009, a jury in Broward County, Fla., somehow could not find any fault at all by doctors. (An incredulous Judge Charles Greene reversed the verdict, dismissed the jury and ordered a new trial.)

London's celebrated high-end restaurant Nobu still serves a bluefin tuna entree for the equivalent of about $51 but is apparently ashamed that it has a fresh inventory ready to carve, according to a May report in the Daily Telegraph. Printed on the menu is this advisory: "Bluefin tuna is an environmentally threatened species -- please ask your server for an alternative."

-- They're Studying What? Where? (1) Doctors and specialists from the New York Psychiatric Institute are in the middle of a two-year investigation, on a $400,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), on why gay men have risky sex in Argentina. Researchers visit gay bars nightly in Buenos Aires and question men about their behavior and substance abuse. (2) Wayne State University (Detroit) researchers, operating on a $2.6 million NIH grant, are now "training" prostitutes to drink alcohol responsibly, to reduce the women's willingness to engage in risky sex. However, the training is taking place in Guangxi province, China.

-- Challenges of Geography: (1) In March, China's Minister of Railways, Liu Zhijun, acknowledged that the government has plans for a rail line connecting Beijing and Taipei, Taiwan (which would involve traversing the Taiwan Strait, which is 108 miles across at its narrowest point). (2) The Czech Republic newspaper Lidove Noviny reported in May that, as late as 1975, the communist government of Czechoslovakia was actively planning to dig a tunnel from that landlocked country underneath Austria and the part of Yugoslavia that is now Slovenia, to give it rail access to the Adriatic Sea, 250 miles away. It is not known what the Austrians and the Yugoslavs thought of the idea.

Kerry Fenton's pub, The Cutting Edge, in Worsbrough, England, initially complied with the 2007 Smoking Act, which prohibits lighting up inside. However, since smoking research is generally carried on indoors, "research" was exempt from the law. Fenton ultimately renamed part of the bar the Smoking Research Centre and allows patrons to smoke provided they fill out questionnaires about their habit. So far, according to a May BBC News report, neither Britain's Home Office nor the local Barnsley council has intervened.

(1) Timothy Martin, 44, was arrested in Federal Way, Wash., in May for felony indecent exposure after he was spotted standing partially nude with a string attached to his penis and, according to police, apparently "manipulating it with the string like a puppet." (2) Two workers at Yellowstone National Park were fired in May after being caught on surveillance video urinating into the Old Faithful geyser.

-- Police in Indianapolis charged Fifth Third Bank manager Dwayne Roberts, 31, with arson and theft after the failure of his scheme to cover up embezzlement. Police said that Roberts elaborately staged a fire inside a locked vault so that an undeterminable amount of money would burn up, thus perhaps covering his cash shortage. However, after Roberts had set the fire and locked the vault, he realized he had left his keys inside and could not re-open the vault or lock the bank's doors or drive home.

-- Donny Guy, 31, was arrested in Hickory, N.C., in May and charged with burglary of the Captain's Galley Seafood restaurant in a caper caught on surveillance video. Guy was immediately a suspect because he lives in an apartment about 50 yards from the restaurant, and there were two paper trails from the restaurant almost to his front door. The video revealed that, in carrying away the two cash registers in the dark, the burglar failed to notice that the spools of paper in each machine had snagged on something in the restaurant and were unraveling with each step he took.

Most Helpful Bureaucrat: When Hermilo Mendez, 28, found himself behind bars on a minor charge in early 2002 in Dilley, Texas, he realized that he finally had time to work on his long-desired divorce and wrote the county clerk in San Antonio to start the paperwork. First, though, he needed the clerk's help, in that he could not remember his wife's name. The couple had married in 1992 after a one-week courtship, and she cleared out shortly afterward. The clerk researched it and informed Mendez that he had been joined in holy matrimony with "Violeta Sanchez Juarez" and that she had apparently long ago returned to Mexico.

As Denver's newsweekly Westword asked in a May 2009 story, "Where would you take a $100,000 check that is also a suicide note, to the cops or to the bank?" In July 2008, John Francis Beech, a retired executive in Denver, sent a check for $100,000 to a local charity, postdated to Aug. 1, accompanied by a sealed envelope reading "wait until you hear from coroner" and "everything is OK." The charity's director, Annie Green, opened the envelope anyway on July 21, to find Beech's Last Will and Testament, leaving his entire estate to Green's organization for children with developmental disabilities. Green's choice: Put everything into the school's safe and await Aug. 1 (but she claimed to have left two voice-mail messages for Beech). On July 29, based on longstanding plans, Beech committed suicide.

-- Over a 10-week period this summer, nearly 200 young Saudi women are auditioning for a beauty pageant, but one called "Miss Beautiful Morals," in which physical attractiveness is irrelevant, replaced by judging of the ladies' observance of traditional Saudi values, especially the honoring of their mothers. Saudi Arabia does have pageants devoted to physical beauty, as reported in News of the Weird in 2007 and 2008, but those are contests for camels and goats, based on such criteria as (according to one camel breeder) "big eyes, long lashes and a long neck."

-- Kailash Singh, 63, who lives in a village near the holy city of Varanasi, India, told reporters in May that he had not bathed in the last 35 years, but for a good reason: remaining water-free would improve his chances of fathering a male instead of a female. (It hasn't worked, and he has moved on to a new cause, shunning baths until India's social problems are resolved.) Singh previously owned a shop, but became a farmer because customers increasingly declined to approach him.

-- Recurring Theme: According to a March dispatch in London's Observer, activists in Mauritania have protested the new military government's support for an African tribal tradition of forcibly fattening up adolescent girls to make them appear "healthier" for early marriage (traditional in, among other countries, Nigeria, mentioned in News of the Weird in 1998). In the custom of "leblouh," the size of the female indicates "the size of her place in her man's heart."

Ms. Nour Hadad, 26, was arrested in Orland Park, Ill., in April and charged with (and, according to police, confessed to) beating her 2-year-old niece to death while baby-sitting, and, as usual, police publicly released her booking photograph. However, Hadad's husband, Alaeddin, immediately complained that her photo, without her head scarf, was an "insult" to Islam. Said a Muslim activist, "They should respect the modesty of the accused."

(1) Entomologists in San Antonio said in May that the "Raspberry ant" (whose colonies produce billions and cover everything in sight) had migrated north to within 75 miles of the city and would arrive by year's end, posing, said one, a "potential ecological disaster." (2) A University of Florida researcher found, for a recent journal article, that mockingbirds, among all animals, are skilled at identifying particular humans who have displeased them and whom they wish to attack.

Defense attorney John Garcia convinced a jury in Merced, Calif., in May that his client was not guilty of the "forcible rape with great bodily injury" of an 18-year-old woman in 2004, despite the fact that only his client's DNA-identified semen was present, mixed with the victim's blood, on the shorts she wore at the crime scene. Client Daniel Saldana's story was that he had previously had sex with his own girlfriend in the house where the rape occurred and that the girlfriend might have left her shorts on the floor and that the rape victim might have mistakenly put them on after the "other" man raped her.

-- Nelson Blewett, 22, was treated for serious burns in Port Angeles, Wash., on May 18 after playing a game of TAG-tag with pals. They were spritzing each other with TAG body spray and then striking matches, creating mostly lower-risk flames. Then, perhaps inspired by too much beer, one friend added lighter fluid to the game. Blewett was afire for 30 to 45 seconds until he leaped from a second-story porch and rolled on the ground. (He survived but with "excruciating" second- and third-degree burns.)

The Aristocrats! (1) Charles Williams, 37, and his wife, Gretchen, 33, were arrested in Greenville, S.C., in April after a domestic dispute, culminating in a gunfight in which they shot each other. (2) Two fathers (Enrique Gonzalez, 26, in Fresno, Calif., in April and Eugene Ashley, 24, in Floyd County, Ga., in May) were charged with forcibly tattooing their young sons. Gonzalez allegedly held down his 7-year-old while a tattooist inked a gang symbol, and Ashley allegedly inked "DB" (for Daddy's Boy) personally on his 3-year-old's shoulder.

The Right to Remain Silent: Timothy Williams' lawyer had a good defense worked out in Williams' May murder trial in Pittsburgh: When Williams fatally shot the "other" man in the love triangle with Williams' girlfriend, it was a "crime of passion," said the lawyer, befitting manslaughter rather than first-degree murder. But Williams insisted on taking the stand, and by the time he was done, he had openly bragged that he was a "swinger" with many girlfriends, that this particular woman meant "nothing" to him, and that, though he killed the man, police had somehow "sabotaged" the surveillance video of the shooting. Verdict: first-degree murder.

The long-running battle between Alan Davis, 53, and officials in Altamonte Springs, Fla., began anew in May, upon Davis' release from prison after serving a year for his latest defiance of court orders to clear the "junk" out of his yard ("felony littering"). It was his third prison stretch in five years, and he said he is not done yet. Just before his latest stretch, he had placed a giant sculpted derriere in front of the Seminole County Courthouse. In May, he told reporters that he would rejoin the battle by ringing his yard with 42 smaller, similar sculptures.

(1) When retired NYPD officer John Comparetto was approached at gunpoint in a men's room of a Holiday Inn near Harrisburg, Pa., in March, he quietly handed over his wallet, but when the robber left, Comparetto pulled his own gun and gave chase. He also summoned some of the other 300 narcotics officers attending a convention in the hotel and quickly captured the man, who, said Comparetto, is "probably the dumbest criminal in Pennsylvania." (2) A 27-year-old woman in Lexington Park, Md., was injured in March during apparently consensual sex play. Her partner placed a "sex toy" over a saber saw blade, apparently to act as a souped-up vibrator, but the blade cut through the toy and caused serious lacerations, requiring her to be med-evac'ed to Prince George's Hospital Center.

In 1993 India Scott dated both Darryl Fletcher and Brandon Ventimeglia when she lived in Detroit and moved in with Fletcher in 1994 when she was about to give birth. Neither knew about the other, and she had told each man he was the father. For two difficult years, Scott somehow managed to juggle the men's visitations, but in March 1997 when she announced she was leaving the area, both Fletcher and Ventimeglia separately filed for custody of "his" son. Only then did Ventimeglia and Fletcher find out about each other. They took blood tests to determine which was the real father of the boy they had cared for for more than two years, and in May 1997 the blood test revealed that neither was.